Christopher Bowers

http://www.libdems.org.uk/chris_bowers

Chris Bowers
Brighton Pavilion

Chris Bowers is a writer and broadcaster, and the Lib Dems’ candidate for Brighton Pavilion.

Although known mainly to tennis fans as a commentator and the biographer of Wimbledon champions Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, he’s also written Nick Clegg’s biography, plus he’s an environmental campaigner of more than 20 years’ standing – making him ideally placed to take on Britain’s sole Green MP.

“One of my mantras is that you can be deeply concerned about the environment without being in the Green party,” he says, “and what I offer the voters of Pavilion is a pragmatic alternative to Caroline Lucas. The best she can hope to be is a one-woman pressure group in the Commons, while the Lib Dems have run the Department of Energy and Climate Change for four years and could be in government again. We’ve seen from how naïve the Greens have been in running Brighton council that experience is vital in getting things done.”

Chris has been a councillor on neighbouring Lewes District Council since 2007 and is a former Lib Dem group leader. In 1990 he founded the Environmental Transport Association, still works as a consultant to the European Federation for Transport and Environment, and is chair of a small charitable trust fund.

And he’s bullish about the Lib Dems’ record in government. “If you look back to the climate before the 2010 election, people craved a new politics. Well we’ve provided it in the form of cooperation in government, bringing in socially caring ideas such as index linking pensions, the pupil premium, apprenticeships and raising the income tax threshold, and just got on quietly with the business of government. We now need to trumpet this message, and highlight how tragic it would be if people didn’t recognise what they wanted when they finally got it, and ended up back with one-party government.”